Can love be an autistic special interest?
Special interests are characterised most canonically as nerds and their quantum physics, or middle-aged autistics with locomotives; predictably male iterations of autism spectrum disorder. There is little in mainstream knowledge or media that unpicks what special interests mean to young girls and the women that they become. As tends to be the case, we are dismissed and missed due to the lacking understanding of how autistic traits can manifest differently in females.
Autistic people are also oddly characterised as people who ‘lack empathy’, somehow likening us to emotionless Jeffrey Dahmers - the biggest load of codswallop I’ve heard since I was told I “can’t be autistic because [I] make eye contact”.
Just wait until you hear about this thing called masking, Sandra.
The reality seems to be very far from this. If anything - particularly for autistic women - we tend to experience a surplus of empathy and emotion; just in an alternative manner to neurotypical people.
In fact, there are growing accounts that autistic girls and women actually tend to focus their special interests on people and psychology, whether in a bid to understand or to be understood by others. We are more likely to mask and to mirror, often using films and television characters to map our personalities onto, in a bid to understand the complexities of socialising. It’s common for us to do this in childhood also, by observing how our peers seem to seamlessly interact and in turn, working out how to emulate them.
This can then extend to romantic interests. Romantic interests, for a lot of autistic people (myself included) are a lot more straightforward than friendships. Relationships have relatively clear stages, milestones and roles to be played out. Friendships are unpredictable and boundaries are very seldom established; often much more of a minefield to navigate.
For me, romantic love became the backdrop of my life from the age of fifteen or so. Subconsciously gravitating towards neurodivergent partners, I tended to fully enmesh myself into these guys (and the occasional girl) who appeared to have a much more solid sense of self than I could wish for at the time. I latched onto it. I made elements of their personality my own.
I still refuse to dig my knife into the butter when making toast, instead delicately skimming the top layer and keeping it tidy; an idiosyncrasy stolen from a boyfriend at age twenty. I still listen to several of the bands that I was introduced to by my first boyfriend, aged fourteen. I decided to write a portion of my English Literature university dissertation on a Japanese rewriting of Nabokov’s Lolita (???) at age twenty-one, as my ex had just moved there and I was so obsessed with him that it helped buoy me through the learning process. And I got a First.
I was the original crazy ex-girlfriend.
There are many diabolically cringeworthy stories that I could delight and disgust you with, but I think I’ll be saving those for behind a paywall. But the point stands that, given the misconception that autistic people are entirely disinterested in their fellow humans, women are instead being diagnosed with more stigma-heavy diagnoses like borderline personality disorder; becoming vilified for something that is tolerated when it’s a boy screaming the place down because his trainset is moved without consent.
Until science starts moving the needle on the understanding of this, it will only serve to continue that women are missed out and overlooked by GPs, psychologists and psychiatrists - even police offers and A&E doctors - their meltdowns will continue to be villainised as manipulative behaviours and their shutdowns will continue to be lambasted as non-compliance to treatment. We need to do better for autistic women.
